Two trends to watch in coming months/years:
1. Companies will revert to closed-source and cease contributions to F/OSS projects. Their legal team will advise them that trade secrets are the only way to protect LLM-generated code.
2. Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs.
These are already the most common reactions to the current legal status of LLM-generated works. If it is "uncopyrightable" and goes into the Public Domain or equivalent, then the F/OSS ideology will be considered untenable, except where software is exclusively written by hand.
This is one major reason that Codeberg, Linux, and other projects have said "no AI contributions or repos", because there is no value in being a Public-Domain-Dumping-Ground. If there is no copyright to assign, sublicense, or transfer, then there is no value in the content to any hosting service.
> Linux […] said "no AI contributions or repos"
On the contrary: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8T...
Linus is not GNU/Linux. Nor is he a sole dictator in the project
This is an excellent point. OSS licenses only work because of copyright. The intention was to kind of "judo" copyright law to benefit sharing. If the work is uncopyrightable, no license of any sort applies to it.
Before I started running with the OSS crowd, I wanted to put my code in the public domain. I quickly learned that isn't a thing with US copyright law. Any time you create a new work (of the sort that isn't specifically excluded from copyright) it is immediately and automatically copyrighted by you in that instant. If you don't want it to be, tough. It's copyrighted. The best you could do was apply a permissive license.
But now, perhaps there's a workaround for those who really want to be something they made in the public domain: claim it was machine generated. There's an interesting thought...
SQLite has been public domain for a very long time, and has been very widely used on that basis, with no problem. There are some other countries where this is true.
> Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs
It's only "falsely" if the courts rule that LLM-written code is not copyrightable, and so far there's no indication of that happening, although I do see a lot of people secretly wishing for that to be true.
It is conceivable, albeit unlikely, that courts will eventually find that original authors retain ownership or rights, that is, the ingestion of the corpus by models has not diluted copyright status. Or that the company who publishes the model enjoys some ownership or rights over their output. Or that the artificial nature of every work must be acknowledged or documented in some way.
So to clarify: publishers are already claiming exclusive authorship and exclusive ownership of copyright. The exclusive authorship claims are especially problematic, even today, when major platforms are requiring tags or acknowledgement that there is genAI content in any given work.
If you went on Etsy, or Fiverr, and commissioned artwork, would you be OK with a seller claiming 100% ownership and copyright on a work? What if they assigned, or attempted to assign, that copyright ownership to the buyer?
I'm sorry, you're going to have to dumb it down for me. Are you saying it's "conceivable but unlikely" that courts will find that LLM generated code is owned, collectively, by the millions of people who's code was used in training data? Or is it's "conceivable but unlikely" that LLM generated code will be owned by the person who's prompts elicited the output?